Creating Safety
This election brings far too many familiar faces to the council and city hall. They remind us that there is a lot of work to be done to move us toward a more just city.
Central to this work is a hard look at policing. Just prior to the election, Pew Research released a new poll indicating that public opinion is shifting in favor of police spending. The survey indicated:
The share of adults who say spending on policing in their area should be increased now stands at 47%, up from 31% in June 2020. That includes 21% who say funding for their local police should be increased a lot, up from 11% who said this last summer.
And while young people, Democrats and African Americans continue to be skeptical of police, the researchers found, “The share of Black adults who say police spending in their area should be decreased has fallen 19 percentage points since last year (from 42% to 23%), including a 13-point decline in the share who say funding should be decreased a lot (from 22% to 9%). “Also, the share of Democrats who say funding for local police should be decreased “has fallen markedly – from 41% in 2020 to 25% today.”
In short, defunding police has given way to concerns for fighting crime. The study indicated that in July of this year, at the height of the protests against police brutality, the vast majority of people ranked fighting crime as a major concern. Overall, 61% of adults said crime was “a very big problem.” This is a dramatic increase from just a few months earlier, in April, when only 48% ranked it as a critical issue.
But over the summer, politicians and vested corporate interests intensified the fear of crime, highlighting increases in violence during the pandemic. As a result, across the country, local politicians and campaigners backed away from calls to defund the police or to increase civilian controls.
These national trends are reflected here in Detroit as we are again seeing headlines labelling us “among the most violent cities.”
We who are committed to creating new forms of community safety need to look at the ways in which fear and crime statistics are being manipulated by corporate powers. There has been a systematic campaign to delegitimize public demonstrations, to highlight increasing interpersonal tensions, and to conflate more money for police with safety.
While there is no doubt that crime has intensified, a longer view recognizes that over the last two decades, Detroit has seen a dramatic drop in criminal activity. This increase in community safety occurred with a dysfunctional and corrupt police department. After the long standing tenure of Chief Hart, Detroit went through a series of Chiefs, nearly 10 before the current leader, Chief White. Response times were a national joke. Yet crime fell. This was primarily because of a mosaic of community mobilizations for peace. Block clubs, churches, community groups and non-profit organizations initiated strategies to decrease violence, including marches, crime watch efforts, and programs for youth. Schools adopted efforts for conflict resolution.
As Mariame Kaba, one of the leading thinkers about abolition has pointed out:
There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.
This is the truth we have to bring forward as we think about our future.